Era

On January 14, 2007, ERA ANNIE TUNKINS. On Friday, Mrs. Tunkins will lie in state at New Shiloh Baptist Church, 2100 N. Monroe Street, where the family will receive friends from 10 to 11 A.M., with services to follow. Inquiries to (410) 233-2400.

While introducing Dave Wallace and Dom Chiti to Camden Yards this offseason, Orioles manager Buck Showalter pointed out the bronze statues of the team's six Hall of Famers beyond the left-center-field fence. “You know, if you two guys figure out this pitching here,” Showalter joked, “there will probably be a statue out there of you two guys.” And after the strides the pitching staff has made under Wallace, the pitching coach, and Chiti, the bullpen coach, in their first year working with the Orioles, Showalter recently joked that he's going to have to make good on his promise and give the duo miniature statues of themselves.

BEREA, Ohio - Much was made of the Browns' decision to draft a 28-year-old quarterback a season ago. But if Brandon Weeden fails to produce this fall, his age likely becomes inconsequential to Cleveland fans. “If Brandon doesn't do it this year, we're going to be starting over again at quarterback,” former Browns coach Sam Rutigliano said. Not long ago, few could imagine giving up on a first-round quarterback after just two seasons. Nowadays, few would refute Rutligliano's assessment.

The same simple question comes up every time another major league baseball player tests positive for a controlled substance during this era of universal testing, and it's fair to apply it to Orioles slugger Chris Davis. How could anyone be this stupid? The testing protocols are known to every player. The rules are posted in every clubhouse. There are a couple of decades of steroid scandal in the rear-view mirror and the performance-enhancing drug era is littered with players who have endangered their team's playoff chances by either failing to clear a substance with the team's medical staff or taking the chance that they won't be caught.

WASHINGTON -- "Poets," noted G.K. Chesterton, "have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." His point was that this was not mysterious: Cheese is not the sort of subject that summons poetic thoughts.Presidents have hitherto been mysteriously silent about child-safety seats. However, last Saturday President Clinton's radio address concerned an improved fastening mechanism for such seats in automobiles. This was the third time this president has used a Saturday address to talk about child-safety seats.

WASHINGTON -- The Equal Rights Amendment lingers on, its pulse faint but its supporters determined. Their slender hopes arise from recent disrespect for the amending process.First introduced in Congress in 1923, the ERA says: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."In 1971, the year before Title IX prohibited sexual discrimination in education, the Supreme Court for the first time cited the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to invalidate a law on the grounds that it involved discrimination on the basis of sex.Despite this evidence that the ERA might be a legal redundancy (ERA supporters said it was needed to "put women into the Constitution")

BOSTON -- And you thought the Equal Rights Amendment was dead. We all did. The amendment flat-lined in 1982, just three states short of the 38 needed for ratification. I even wrote an obit. Back then, feminists shifted their sights to politics, saying if we can't change the state legislators' minds, we'll change their faces. A baby girl born in 1982 will cast her first vote in 2000 without being equal under the law. But what's this I hear out of Missouri? Can it be the faint sound of a pulse?

Who were those guys?Allen Plaster and Bobby Chouinard didn't exactly make names for themselves in the Orioles' farm system, and now they're gone to the Oakland Athletics for Harold Baines.The A's apparently decided to go for future rather thaimmediate help when they accepted right-handers Chouinard and Plaster for the veteran left-handed slugger.Both had losing records but impressive numbers while pitchinin Single-A last year. Both were repeat performers at that classification, with 85-mph fastballs.

Prodded by signs of hope from Iowa to California, the campaign for a national Equal Rights Amendment is stirring from a decade of slumber, and the right combination of Election Day victories could set off a new 10-year push for ratification.The hopeful signs include a likely win for a state ERA referendum in once-resistant Iowa, a surge in female candidacies at all levels ofgovernment, and the prospect that a Democrat sympathetic to the ERA will win the presidency.But the most intriguing indicator may be signs of ideological retreat among the ERA's staunchest opponents on the Christian Right.

It doesn't look like a good year for Babe Ruth. Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent has erased his name from the record book by purging the asterisk next to the name of Roger Maris.And any day (week, month, year?) now, The Babe's hometown, for the second time, is expected to snub a campaign to name a stadium after its legendary baseball hero. A lot of people forget, but there was a strong effort to name Memorial Stadium after Ruth, but with the memory of the Korean conflict and World War II so vivid there was even less chance then than now.By all accounts, The Bambino was baseball's greatest player -- and most likely its most flamboyant personality.

Tonight, Baltimore becomes a casino town. With the opening of the $442 million Horseshoe Casino Baltimore on Russell Street, the city enters an era of legalized slots, table games and poker that seemed impossible just a dozen years ago. Back then, people were busy drawing lines - first no slots at racetracks; then maybe, but no table games; then state-regulated slots at five locations and then six, along with everything else. Voters got their say, both on the matter of expanded gambling and then the location of the state's largest casino, Maryland Live, at Arundel Mills.

Tucked inside the files at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston are State Department notes from the 1960s detailing racial discrimination along U.S. 40 in Maryland - and warning the president of its implications for the Cold War. One account describes the experience of an African diplomat who couldn't find a restaurant to serve a glass of water for his son as the boy struggled to catch his breath during an asthma attack. Another tells of a diplomat who drove 10 bleary-eyed hours along the highway - then the main thoroughfare between New York and Washington - because motels in Maryland wouldn't rent him a room for the night.

Orioles starter Chris Tillman dominated the Seattle Mariners lineup again Sunday, but he wants everyone to know that it's nothing personal. Of course, Tillman came over to the Orioles in the 2008 trade with the Mariners that also brought All-Star center fielder Adam Jones and three others for left-hander Erik Bedard - a move that is widely credited for being the watershed moment in the club's return to prominence after 14 consecutive losing seasons....

Baseball's All-Star Game meant a great deal to me when I was a young fan. So it saddens me to see what an embattled institution it's become. The numbers are undeniable. As SI.com's Richard Deitsch noted Monday , last year's television audience of 11 million was down 61 percent from the 28 million who watched in 1985. That's a meaningful comparison for me, because 1985 lay right in the heart of my romance with the midsummer classic. I was 9 years old and obsessed with the sport.

Chris Tillman may not have 11 wins like he did at the midway point last season, but his numbers have been far from disappointing. Including Saturday's loss to the New York Yankees, the Orioles right-hander is 7-5 with a 4.11 ERA going into the All-Star break. Last year, when he was invited to the All-Star Game, his ERA was only a few ticks lower, at 3.95. “I think it bodes well, hopefully for the rest of the season, because he seems to be getting more consistent mechanically as we go,” Orioles manager Buck Showalter said.

What remarkable lives they led. The five men, who hailed mostly from the pinnacle of French aristocracy, were liberals who threw off their own privileges to build a more equitable society. Individually, they danced with Marie Antoinette, fled the guillotine, spied for their country and played a role in a slave revolt in Haiti. All five relocated to Philadelphia, and in just a handful of years managed to exert a lasting impact on the fledgling United States of America. Francois Furstenberg, an associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, follows the exiles on their American adventures in his new book, "When the United States Spoke French.

If you weren't sure before last week, then you ought to be sure now: NFL history can now be divided into two eras -- B.G. and A.G. Before Goodell and After Goodell. Before Goodell, a player could be charged with having enough guns in his house to supply an island rebellion, and he would still be allowed to play. In the Super Bowl, no less. After Goodell, that same player could be charged with driving a little too fast after consuming alcohol within legal limits and get kicked off his team almost before he finishes posting bail.

Baltimoreans who witnessed his odyssey unfold will remember the first 12 years of the 21st century as the Michael Phelps era. If you mark the life of this community by our shared experiences and our heroic figures — the sources of civic pride that keep us from despairing and sinking into the Patapsco — there's no getting around Phelps. Some might prefer to call it the Ray Lewis era because of the way that larger-than-life linebacker and his Ravens so dominated the region's sports scene, winning a Super Bowl in January 2001 and then giving us hope for another Lombardi Trophy in almost every season since.

Ollie M.J. Ray, whose career teaching in city public schools spanned nearly four decades, died Tuesday of heart failure at Northwest Hospital. She was 82. "They say teachers are born, and Ollie had not only the native ability to be a teacher but also the desire," said Hayyte Jackson, who was a college friend and later a colleague in Baltimore public schools. "She had a great love for children and young people, and wanted to see them receive their appropriate secular and Christian education," said Mrs. Jackson, who retired in 1993 from Windsor Hills Elementary School, where she had been principal.

This was the promise: No longer would African-Americans be forced to pick up their meals from the back door of restaurants. No longer would they need to fear being unable to find lodgings on their way home from a trip. And no longer would those who denied them a seat in a theater or on a merry-go-round be able to cloak their prejudice with the law. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, the culmination of decades of struggle for racial equality.